by Hugh Howey
“I’ll call you if I find a ride,” Daniel yelled back. He gave his brother a thumbs-up, which won a pair of rolled eyes. His bother started pulling away in the Taurus before Daniel had a chance to slam the door. The car’s acceleration did it for him.
“Who’s that?” someone in the yard yelled at him. “No randos!”
Daniel turned to the house to see silhouettes scattered across the front yard, embers glowing as smokers inhaled. An empty grocery bag buzzed past on a stiff breeze. Daniel looked to the sky behind him and realized it was much darker than it should’ve been. The feeder bands were already reaching overhead, blotting out the waning rays of the summer’s late setting sun. The last Daniel had heard, the storm was moving a bit more north, starting the habitual hysteria in Charleston that had become an annual event ever since Hugo crushed the peninsula two decades ago.
“I think it’s that creeper,” someone else said, their voice drifting along with the music.
Daniel ignored the smattering of kids in the yard. He weaved his way down a driveway stuffed with cars and headed for the side door. A handful of kids were in one of the cars, bright orange dots flaring out with inhalations, then dying down in a cloud of smoke. Coughing broke out, followed by laughter.
The garage door was open, a crowd spilling out of it. Daniel made his way through. A kid he somewhat recognized from school sat behind a card table, selling red plastic cups for ten bucks. A keg in the corner of the garage couldn’t have been getting more attention if it had on a mini skirt. Daniel waved the kid off and squeezed his way inside.
Around the line of girls snaking back from what Daniel assumed was a bathroom, he caught a glimpse of Jeremy Stevens directing traffic. Daniel went the other way, into the dining room where two wannabe DJs had their turntables set up. Wires snaked everywhere; two egg crates full of LPs sat on chairs to either side, and both boys held their headphones to their ears, nodding their heads off beat to what could only be different tunes than the one playing. Speakers stacked in one corner rattled the windows with great puffs of bass. Daniel could feel his shirt flutter against his chest as he walked by. It was too loud to even think in the room. He pushed his way through as quick as he could.
In the next room, Daniel stumbled onto a videogame tournament of some sort. An extra TV had been set up, and eight boys sprawled across sofas and chairs with an equal number of dead-bored girlfriends. Both TVs were broken into four squares, each square with its own gun bobbing in the center, chasing after something to kill. Somebody knocked over a plastic cup full of beer, which led to more screaming and cursing. A girl squealed and clutched her dress.
“Daniel!”
A hand slapped down on his shoulder; Daniel turned to see Roby grinning at him, a plastic red cup in his hand.
“You drinking?”
“Jada’s driving,” Roby said.
Daniel looked around. “Where is she?”
“Bathroom. Hey, Amanda Hicks is here.”
Daniel felt his temperature rise. Amanda Hicks was the first girl he’d ever kissed. Or she, at least, had kissed him. Or something. She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a vixen who could disappear around school, then leap out while you’re waiting on the bus one day and swirl her tongue in your mouth. Daniel was equal parts frightened by and in love with her.
“You want a cup?” Roby waved the yeasty scent of cheap beer in Daniel’s face.
“Nah. I told my mom I wouldn’t.”
“Me too,” Roby said, his voice rattling around in his raised cup. He took a long swig, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Hey, maybe the three of us will go swimming later.”
Daniel peeked through the living room and out to the partially lit deck. Each time the sliding glass doors opened, they let in the sounds of laughter, of girls squealing, and water splashing.
“I didn’t bring my trunks, and besides, we’re supposed to get all kinds of rain from that storm.”
Roby rolled his eyes. “You’re in a pool, asshole. You’re already wet. Hey, here’s Jada.”
Daniel looked over his shoulder to see a girl heading their way, a coy smile on her face. Jada was beautiful. Daniel nearly blurted it out loud, he was so surprised. She wasn’t gorgeous, not like a model, she was too short for that. But when he pictured a girl dating his friend Roby, he imagined someone overweight with bad skin and thick glasses. Jada was none of those things.
She stopped in front of Daniel and held out a slender arm, a hand on the end expecting to be clasped. Roby was saying their names to each other. Daniel noted her straight hair, so black and clean it looked purple. She had a normal face, thick lips, a wide smile, and dark eyes that threw out light. Daniel felt her pumping his hand and heard her say something. He was still stunned that his best friend was dating someone not hideous.
“Singing camp, huh?” he asked. He had no idea what he was supposed to be saying.
Jada smiled at Roby. “That’s right. Your friend has a powerful voice.” She smiled and raised a plastic cup to her lips.
“Aren’t you driving?” Daniel asked.
Jada took a gulp and shrugged. Roby slapped Daniel’s back and yelled over a sudden bout of excited screaming from the gamers. “She’s just gonna have one, and we’re not leaving for a while yet!”
Daniel wiped a bead of sweat from his hairline. “I think I’m gonna go outside for a second,” he said. The crush of people, the thumping music, the rat-a-tat gunfire from the games—they were stifling the hell out of him.
“We’ll meet you out there. I’m gonna go hit the keg again.”
Roby and Jada left him there and wove off through the crowd, their hands linked. Daniel felt nauseas. He scanned the throng of laughing, happy, popular people and felt perfectly alone. He really was a rando. A creeper. A sketch. He saw himself—for just an instant—how everyone else must see him: cringing from the music, no cup in hand, no girlfriend, no interest in shooting people online. He dug out his crappy cellphone and checked to see if maybe his brother had called. Perhaps their date had been called off for some unknown reason and he needed to pick Daniel up early. But there were no messages. No texts. No funny SMS clips of the latest thing bound to go viral that he would be last to discover. All he saw was the time, which let him know he’d only been at Jeremy Stevens’s party for fifteen minutes.
Daniel shoved the phone back in his pocket and moved toward the patio door. He wanted to get outside and let the humid coastal breeze cool his sudden sweat.
The glass doors slid open and burped more laughter, squeals, and wet swimming noises his way. Daniel pushed through the mob choked up by the doors, fought through the cup-holders and dripping bathers, and finally dove between the gaping glass teeth of Jeremy’s home, escaping the gullet of his teenage discomfort.
7
A stiff wind chilled the sweat on the back of Daniel’s neck, then moved off to rustle in the trees. The concrete patio behind the house was wet from the running, shivering, dripping swimmers. Daniel got out of the way as more people filed through the swish and slam of the glass door. He felt pathetic without anything in his hand and no one to talk to. He shoved his fists into his shorts and tried to look normal. He swore someone in the pool said something about a creeper, and further swore that they were referring to him.
Daniel strolled off to one corner of the patio where there was less light. He then realized that this would do nothing to make him appear more normal.
A girl from his homeroom—Valerie, he thought—ran by in a soaked t-shirt, her lacy red bra visible beneath. The glint of steel from her lip and nose piercings caught Daniel’s attention. He had no idea she had them, having never seen her outside of school. As she shuffled around to the pool’s steps, he saw that her shirt just came down to her waist, exposing the panties she was wearing for bottoms. A tattoo peeked out between the two at him, like a bashful eye. There was no way she was old enough to get a legal tattoo; he wasn’t sure about the piercings, what age you needed to be to get them. Daniel wondered wha
t her parents thought about it all.
As the DJ moved from bass-heavy hip-hop to some rapid trance music, the energy of the crowd intensified. Or maybe it was the wind picking up. Daniel huddled up to the side of the house under a mildewed awning and watched his classmates in their natural environment. He felt like a naturalist on safari.
This is the missing episode of Planet Earth, he realized. They never did a show on the most bizarre life form of them all: humans.
A boy one year older than his sister joined Daniel in the darkness, his red Mohawk spiked up tall. He leaned against the wall, slid down to his butt, and started trying to coax a flame out of his lighter, his hands forming a desperate variety of cup and bowl shapes against the wind.
Daniel looked from the triangular spikes pointing up at him, to the kid with the horn-rimmed frames and flat-billed trucker hat, to Valerie’s metallic adornments. He looked from the skinny jeans to the baggy pants that were shaped like shorts, but so large and worn so low, they almost went to the kid’s ankles. There were girls in glitter, girls with black lips, girls with fake tans, girls powdered to a vampiric pale, kids with spiked collars, with outrageous cowboy beltbuckles, with superhero shirts, with faded logos of products that none of them had been alive for the manufacture of—
And Daniel looked down at himself. He wore a pair of tan shorts that looked like at least a dozen other pair of his tan shorts. He had picked out one of the few t-shirts that was both clean and hadn’t been left in a twisted ball to wrinkle. There was nothing hip about his shirt. Nothing vintage. Nothing ironic. It was just plain and dull and normal, like him.
The wind whistled through Jeremy Stevens’s back yard, howling through the trees, heard even above the music. Daniel had a sudden realization: he was the only kid he knew who didn’t fit in somewhere. And it was because he wasn’t even trying. He had put no effort into it. A cannonball threw a splash of water his way, and Daniel danced to the side, catching a little on his shin. He laughed and scanned the cliques, wondering which one he could probably belong to. Were there any that didn’t require tattoos or needles? Was it too late to try and join a group during his senior year? How would he walk up to the hipsters in a pair of tight pants, the cuffs high above his ankles, a scarf around his neck in August, and explain to them that he was now one of them? Or would he be better off just dressing up and waiting for them to come to him? That sounded more reasonable. Daniel wondered what Roby would think. Then he wondered what was taking his friend so long to fill his cup and come out and join him. He looked around for the couple and saw, now that he was looking for differences amongst his classmates, what they all had in common. One accessory that even the swimmers had, holding them up above the turbulent, rippling water:
Plastic cups.
••••
“Ten bucks.”
Daniel handed the kid a twenty and took his change. The bill he got back was soaking wet with what Daniel hoped to hell was pool water. He wadded the tenner, shoved it in a pocket, and took his cup.
Someone did a handstand on the keg while Daniel waited in an amorphous blob of a line. Once they were done, several people squeezed through from behind to get topped up, and Daniel realized he’d have to be a little more assertive if he was going to get a drink. He pushed through and held his cup out alongside a cluster of two others—plastic rims crinkling together—while someone showered gold-colored beer in all three and across their knuckles.
Daniel came away shaking foam off his hand. He wiped his palm on his shorts, then realized how that smell was going to linger. He tried to remember if he’d told his mom he wasn’t going to drink at all, or if he’d said he was just going to have one. His brother was driving, he reminded himself. He took a sip from the cup, foam tickling his nose, and wondered if his brother had also promised not to drink.
“Are you in line?”
Somebody tapped Daniel on the shoulder. He spun around and realized he was standing by the keg, sipping on his beer. A pack of thirsty animals with empty cups were arranged behind him, all of them staring.
“No, go ahead.”
Someone mumbled “rando” loud enough to hear, and Daniel wanted to point out that he wasn’t random at all. He’d been invited by someone who’d been invited by someone.
“Jeremy Stevens would’ve taken summer school if it weren’t for my best friend,” he wanted to shout out.
He shuffled out of the way and back into the house, dodging elbows and potential spills as he went. The number of people in and around the house seemed to have doubled since his first tour through. Daniel rose up on his toes and looked for the distinctive dark curly head of his best friend, wondering where they’d gotten to. He thought of asking people, but could foresee the wrinkled faces and the confused “Who?” he’d likely get from most of them. But hey, at least he had his accessory. His drink. He took another gulp, waved his hand toward the far corner of the kitchen like he saw someone he knew, then squeezed through the crowd in that direction.
Daniel was rounding the center island when someone bumped into him from behind, sending him and a splash of his beer into the girl ahead. Daniel cursed and apologized, but his efforts were drowned out by the girl’s startled screams. He reached to brush the foam off her back when she spun around as fast as a tiger—and he smacked Amanda Hicks on the boob, instead.
“What the fuck?” Amanda looked down at her accosted breast, then twisted around like a snake as she tried to reach the back of her shirt. “Was that beer?”
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. He pulled his hand back before she could bite it off.
“I’m so fucked,” she said. She looked up at Daniel. “You’ve totally fucked me.”
Daniel wanted to point out that the most they’d done was kiss, and just that one time.
Amanda punched his shoulder and stormed off, the crowd parting before her huffed rage like a running of the bulls that had been soberly reconsidered.
“Nuts,” Daniel said. He took a swig of his foamy, sorta-cold beer and fought to look inconspicuous. The DJ went back to bass thuds; a plate in the Stevens’s kitchen cabinet rattled to the beat.
“Daniel?”
A familiar and piercing voice squealed at him from behind. Daniel turned and saw the last person he ever expected to see at the party. He would’ve been less surprised to see the girl from the summer before—the second person whose tongue he’d had in his mouth. Instead, he saw his sister, Zola.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” he asked. Both of them looked down at the red cup in her hand, and then at the one in his.
“Don’t you tell mom,” she said.
Daniel steered her toward the sink where a pocket of reduced jostling beckoned.
“How did you get here?”
Zola peered over her shoulder at her friends, but let Daniel guide her by the elbow away from them. “I was at Susie’s and her boyfriend called. We just stopped by so she could see him.”
Daniel tried to grab the cup of beer from her, but his sister steered it away from him. She took the opportunity to nod at his cup. “Didn’t you tell mom you wouldn’t drink tonight?”
“Did I?” Daniel asked. “I thought she said one was okay.”
Zola frowned, and Daniel remembered correctly.
“Truce,” he said.
Zola nodded. She took a defiant sip of her beer, and Daniel felt some foreign sensation, like seeing a color he couldn’t name. He wished he’d hadn’t gotten a beer so he could lecture her, or stop her, or feel less like a hypocrite for doing so. He took his own sip instead, feeling suddenly as if he and she were both of an undeterminable age and either a gap had opened between them or had closed. He had no idea which it was, or in what direction.
“Did you get invited to this?” Zola asked, lowering her drink and glancing back at her friends.
Daniel felt a twinge of humiliation. “Roby invited me.”
“I thought I saw him when I came in,” Zola said. “But who invited him?” She raised he
r hand. “Never mind. I don’t care.” She nodded to one of her friends, who was waving her hand. “I’ve gotta go. My friends are waiting for me.”
“Wait. When did you get here? Have you seen Roby?”
She pointed toward the ceiling. “He was going up the stairs when we came in the front door. I dunno, maybe ten minutes ago?”
Daniel watched as she spun back toward her gaggle of giggling, freshman friends. He peered down at his beer, finished off what was there, realized he was already buzzing and was destined to get grounded for the miserable evening he was having. He went off in search of Roby.
8
Daniel worked his way through the kitchen toward the living room. The stiffening wind outside whistled through the cracked sliding glass door, mixing with the laughter and screams outside. In the living room, the gamers had retired from their eight man tournament and were now watching YouTube videos on the larger of the two TVs. One boy sat on the floor with his laptop, which seemed patched through to the display. Daniel watched a boy on screen jump from a rooftop toward a trampoline, missing violently. The kids on the sofa jumped up and laughed in horror; they clasped their hands over their mouths or pumped their fists.
“You need to get in line,” a girl yelled at him, as Daniel started up the steps.
“Excuse me?” He worried he was slurring already.
“The bathroom? This is the line.” A girl he thought he knew from one of his classes pointed at the long stream of girls standing on the steps, snaking all the way up.
“I’m looking for someone,” Daniel said. But just the mention of the bathroom, and the recently-downed beer, had awakened his bladder.
“I’m watching you,” the girl said.
Daniel lowered his brows at her, wondering if she were serious, then began pushing his way up the crowded steps. A couple came half-tumbling down in the other direction, and he had to press into some other kids to let them by. That started a fresh round of complaints and cries of “creeper” and “no breaking.”
